A lifelong progressive was so disgusted with her party, she voted for
Trump. Will Democrats care enough to win her back?
Wow!

Can you imagine a hard-core progressive Democrat who was so disgusted with her party ... that she voted for the Republican?

The Republican she voted for--Donald Trump--was the most outsider of outsider candidates. There were hard-core, long-time Republicans who had refused to vote for Trump, and there remained holdouts all the way to Election Day who refused to vote for him.

I have more respect for this defiant progressive than the cry-baby conservatives who put their pride in their own purity ahead of the better qualified candidate and the long-term well-being of this country.

Three weeks before Election Day, as she sat at her kitchen table to fill
out her ballot, Kim McKinney Cohen was angry and fed up. The Democratic Party,
to which she had been unswervingly loyal for four decades, had sabotaged her
chosen candidate, Bernie Sanders, and then lectured her about the need to vote
for a woman whose hawkishness and arrogance rubbed her the wrong way. When
Hillary Clinton said dismissively supporters of Donald Trump were “a basket of
deplorables,” Cohen had heard enough.

She became a Deplorable, too!

She was fed up with the arrogance of the Democratic political elite which had sold her short and treated her with complete disdain.
It's amazing to me that Politico points out without hesitation that the DNC D-C'd Bernie Sanders with cheating, lying, background nonsense and shenanigans with the media. I can't imagine how I would feel if the RNC had actively collaborated with Jeb Bush or even Donald Trump to snuff out Scott Walker or Ted Cruz, of those candidates had colluded with leadership to throw the election against Trump and for Hilllary.

I would be beyond livid. I don't think I would stay a Republican any longer!

“Well, then,” she sighed, "I guess I'm a deplorable.”

She took a black ink pen and carefully shaded in the rectangle next to
the name Donald J. Trump.

WOW! Just plain WOW!

With that she had defied every vote she had made since 1974. She defied
a president she had supported twice, officials of a party to which she had
devoted countless hours of volunteer labor and her fellow progressives, even
her husband, who accused her of aiding and abetting a racist. She ignored her
own belief that Trump was a “buffoon” and a “showman.” She never wore a “Make
America Great Again” hat or a “Women for Trump” button or carried a Trump sign,
because she never believed in anything he stood for. But hers wasn't a vote in
favor of someone; it was a vote against.

That's OK. Lots of people voted for Trump for one simple reason: they loathed Crooked Hillary:

A longtime home health care aide, Cohen has many characteristics of a
voter the Democratic Party typically relies on winning: African-American,
environmentally conscious, pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-gun control. But this
year she checked another box: pro-change. When it came down to it, she was
angrier at her own party's leaders than she was appalled by a man who cozied up
to white nationalist and anti-Semitic groups. She wanted to throw it back in
the face of her party.

The above line is pure libel, but at this point it makes no difference. Politico's pick--Crooked Hillary--crashed and burned in front of everyone for all to see!

She honestly never imagined Trump would win. And even though she finds
his choices for Cabinet and other top White House jobs “cringe-worthy,” Cohen
doesn't regret her radical act of defiance. She feels that by helping take the
Democrats to rock bottom, they’ve been “given a gift” to rebuild their party.

I believes that Trump would win, that one of the reliably blue states would flip for Trump ... Three of them flipped!

“I wanted it burned down ... so that we could build a new, hopefully
more equitable one that meets the needs of all, not only the super-rich,” she
said.

Euity is based on the rule of law, and freedom of association. I respect Mrs. Cohen's wishes, but not the means which she champions to get there.

Statistically, Cohen’s vote makes her an outlier. She is among the 10
percent of liberals, 8 percent of blacks and 42 percent of women who voted for
Trump, according to the New York Times exit polling data. She’s not a member of
the white working class, some already lukewarm Democrat who hoped Trump would bring
back jobs to the local coal mine or save the air-conditioning plant from moving
to Mexico. In fact, as an older black woman, Cohen belonged to a group that
sided overwhelmingly with Clinton. Most minority protest voters, according to
Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, went for third-party candidates, and they
were young, between the ages of 18 and 29.

Most protest votes went to Jill Stein. But Cohen did not vote for the Green candidate.

One has to wonder why?

“It’s not like there were a ton” of black liberals who voted for Trump,
Belcher said. “But [Cohen] was important because she contributed to Hillary’s
failure.” (In Cohen's case, this contribution may have been mostly symbolic;
her home state of Colorado was considered a swing state, but went for Clinton.)

As Democrats fret over how to woo back the white working class, they’d
also be well served by taking a look at how many true believers like Kim Cohen
they lost, as well, and what it will take to make peace with them.

True believers like Kim Cohen left because their party was not true to them, and has given the party faithful nothing to believe in.

No surprise there, but of course Hillary Clinton and her coven of sycophants will continue to blame everyone and everything else except themselves, including their message, their messaging, and their messanger.

***

The roots of Cohen’s disenchantment with her party go back to the Iraq
War. She was incensed in May 2007 when Democrats caved to GOP demands to
continue funding the war with no deadline to withdraw troops. Cohen, at the
time a precinct captain in Boulder, Colorado, railed against the newly
installed Democratic majority. “By giving in to Bush, the Democratic Party
bosses have demonstrated their disdain for their base,” Cohen, her hair in
dreadlocks, shouted into a microphone. “Their attitude toward us, the voters,
seems to be: They don't have to worry about losing our support because we have
nowhere to go; it's a two-party system.”

Her anger with the Democratic Party mirrors the frustration of the Tea Party movement with the Republicans. They kept promising to cut the spending, to rein in unsustainable debt, yet cycle after cycle Republicans continued to spend and upend the budget in Washington DC.

Notice how the Democratically controlled Congress caved to George W. Bush on the troop surge. It's not just Republican lawmakers who give into the opposition party's demands.

She was mad at Democrats for backing Bush tax cuts and bailing out rich
bankers while struggling people lost their homes. Even her president, whose
historic election she had celebrated eight years ago through tears of joy,
seemed to have grown complacent and cautious. Republicans were still the enemy,
in her mind, but Democrats were betraying their own agenda.

Indeed!

Bernie’s campaign spoke directly to her, perhaps not so surprising for
someone who had supported Dennis Kucinich in 2004 (she was a convention delegate).
Twelve years later, she hopped on the popular socialist’s bandwagon. She gave
his campaign contributions totaling $262, which for her, with a chronically
ill, 41-year-old son living at home, was a hardship. But she believed Sanders
could repair economic inequality, curb corporate greed and weed out special
interests in Washington.

That sounds like an agenda which Donald Trump has pledged to accomplish. Cohen needs to give Trump a chance.

Cohen had never been particularly enamored of Hillary Clinton. She
didn’t like the way Clinton, when her husband first ran for president in 1992
and later, as first lady, handled her adulterous husband’s “bimbo eruptions.”
In fact, her exasperation with the Clintons led her to become a political
activist. After the bombshell news dropped in 1998 that President Bill Clinton
had carried on an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, Cohen
would spend hours glued to TV coverage of the unfolding scandal and ensuing
impeachment proceedings. Her husband finally told her, “ Quit yelling at the TV
and go do something about it!” (She left the house and came home later announcing
she’d enlisted to become a precinct captain.)

So, Bimbo Bubba got Cohen into activism. And the wife cheated the system in order to ensure her nomination--only to lose to Donald Trump in the general. What a heart-ache for a socialist. Democrats, liberals in general need to wake up and realize that their agenda is not in concert with reality. If they really want to end the arbitrary income inequality plaguing our society, then they need to advocate for free markets and free enterprise.

During Clinton’s campaign this year, Cohen was angrily reminded of a
comment from the former first lady in 1996, when she called young black
criminals “super predators.” And then came the midsummer WikiLeaks
revelations—courtesy of the Kremlin—that Democratic National Committee
officials undermined Sanders’ legitimacy as a candidate. They confirmed her
worst suspicions about the party and the woman who had locked up its
nomination. But the final straw was Clinton’s “deplorables” comment at a rally
in September. Hillary had again insulted working-class Americans, Cohen felt.
The thought crossed her mind: Maybe I’ll join them.

More slander. The Kremlin, Putin, Russian operatives did not hack the DNC's server. This is just sad. No wonder Cohen and Co. have given up on Crooked Hillary---she was a complete media meat puppet who did not care about the common man.

Trump does.

“I went all in for Bernie,” she said. “But the DNC burned him, so I
went off the plantation to become a deplorable.”

WOW! Another Black voter who refuses to the Democratic Party as "the plantation." This report gets more and more interesting and invigorating the more that I read it.

Cohen’s passion for justice comes from an early life of hard knocks.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Cohen was 7 when her mother abandoned her and her
siblings, on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. She moved to Los
Angeles at 13, had a child at 15, married four years later and had a son. Her
husband lost his job, turned to drugs and committed suicide on Memorial Day
1980. A little over a decade later, after marrying and divorcing a truck
driver, Kim met her current husband, a Jewish artist and liberal activist named
Robert “Bob” Carl Cohen, who made a series of films sympathetic to Communist
regimes in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including “Inside Red China” and
“Inside East Germany,” as well as an exposé on the anti-Communist witch hunts
by the House Un-American Activities Committee. (He also made the low-budget
film, “Mondo Hollywood,” which became a cult classic in the 1970s.)

More welcome surprises. She married a Communist sympathizer. She grew up in connection with the same circumstances which Democratic operatives exploit for their own political gain. Yet instead of kowtowing in the end to their ends, she voted for Trump!

Last summer, Bob, 86, wasn’t pleased that Kim’s live-in son, Dale, who
suffers from malignant hypertension, had begun watching Fox News regularly.
(Dale also wound up voting for Trump.) One night before bed he asked his wife,
who shared his aversion to the conservative news network, to put a stop to it.

She said Dale shushed her and said, “Come on, sit down.” When Trump
famously asked black voters, “What the hell do you have to lose?” Kim Cohen
thought to herself, “Yeah, what the hell do I have to lose?”

Bob and Kim would argue about Trump, but he never tried to talk her out
of voting for him. (He wasn’t exactly fond of Clinton either; he wrote in
Bernie Sanders’ name on his ballot.) He says he understands how she was “pushed
to the wall by the cynicism” of her party’s establishment and why she views
them as “hypocritical opportunists.”

A proud feminist, Kim Cohen had fought all her life for equal rights
for women. But in the end, she decided, “I need a job more than I need a woman
in the White House.”

Interesting.

Locally, Kim Cohen’s protest vote didn’t change anything. Colorado
voted for Clinton anyway. And this raises the question of how seriously
Democratic Party leaders will take Cohen’s protest vote. They can write her off
as an aberration, some misguided radical; or they can take a hard look at this
African-American committed progressive, the quintessential Democratic base
voter, who couldn’t be swayed to vote for the fuzzy-messaged candidate at the
top of the ticket.

Democratic Party leaders will not take a hard look at themselves. They would have to admit that their party has been overtaken by communist and socialist interests, all of which are violently opposes to the fundamental values of this country. It should therefore come as no surprise that two-thirds of the state legislatures are controlled by Republicans.

The Politico article spells out what Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate:

But simply running a defensive campaign against Trump, rather than
crafting a message with broad appeal to voters anxious about income stagnation,
clearly failed to inspire voters like Cohen, whom the party assumed were in the
bag.

She was running out the clock the same way that Romney had done in 2012. She thought that the Establishment backing and the inevitable trends of modern politics would put her in the White House. The Democrats elected their first minority candidate then President. The next move was to elect the first woman.

But Bernie supporters, including Kim, were not swayed by the gender card. Lots of young voters slammed Hillary Clinton for demeaning their intelligence and expectations.

Doug Hattaway, a Democratic research and communications strategist,
advised Democrats after their disastrous showing in the 2014 midterm elections
that the party needed to shift from what he calls “transactional
messaging”—selling policy prescriptions to specific groups—to “aspirational
communications.”

Donald Trump offered inspirational communications, especially to counter the drudgery and damage caused by eight years of Barack Obama. While the Democratic Party tried to cajole the voting public to believe that all they needed to do was elect Hillary Clinton for a third term of Obama, the rest of the country wanted something better.

More than change, the voters wanted improvement. More than hope, they wanted restoration,

Final Reflection
Hillary Clinton was one of the worst Presidential candidates in modern times.

She lied repeatedly to the public.

She act ed as if she was above the law--frequently. She misused classified information.

Her husband helped run one of the most corrupt faux-charities in the world, and the Clinton Cash Foundation is facing more inquiries. She was arrogant, cold, fake, a female Democratic version of Mitt Romney.

She also spent money in red states where chances were slim and dim at best.

But it was not just Hillary Clinton who hurt Hillary Clinton. The Democratic National Committee, for at least the past four years, was tipping its hand to make sure that Clinton was the Democratic nominee. They invested everything they had to ensure that they elected the first woman President. The identity politics had so blinded and lulled the Democratic Party into hyper-partisan complacency, they never considered that they would lose the very base which they have relied on for the past twenty years. The "white" vote that rejected Romney and stayed home in 2012 came out and voted in large numbers for Donald Trump.

The cheating, lying, collusion, and total fraud exposed by Wikileaks also diminished the standing and integrity of the party in the eyes of the very voters whom the Democratic Party officials depended on.